Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

James Hodson (BLOOMBERG/ 731 LEX) reply-to: James Hodson to: PRIVATE LIST date: Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 12:23 PM subject: New Adventures mailed-by: bloomberg.net : Important mainly because it was sent directly to you.

New Adventures Inbox x

James Hodson (BLOOMBERG/ 731 LEX) Jul 28 (1 day ago)

to Abraham.Cohen, rettinger, alopez, adammathias, adrian.cristal, emami, aharknes, alan.smeaton, alexander.bozic, alex, aj27, a.birch, alexandre.ekie., alexandre.evsu., alexey.makarov, aljaz.kosmerlj, aljosa.rehar, amanda.medress, andre, Andreas.EISELE, andreas.hoepner, krausea, andreeab, abrasoveanu, andrei.b.ungur. Dear friends,

As many of you are well aware, I have decided to move on from my position as manager of Bloomberg's AI Research group. The last five years have been a wonderful journey, pushing Bloomberg in entirely new directions, and learning a lot along the way.

If there is one thing I'm truly grateful for, it is the opportunity to have built an extensive network of incredible people such as yourselves. You have helped guide me, and enhanced my decision-making every step of the way: from focusing on science and mathematical rigour, to hiring the best people, engaging the AI community, and creating a shared vision for the future. Thank you!

My next steps will not take me away from this core mission. In fact, I hope that with your continued help we will get closer to a world where good science is open to everyone, and accelerates the pace of innovation in all fields, across academia and industry. We are at a crucial moment in the development and deployment of transformational AI-based technologies. I hope we can be a part of this together.

As of today, please use james@hodson.io.

Sincerely,

James

Peter Burgess 12:47 PM (0 minutes ago)

to James

Dear James

Very best wishes on the next part of your journey ...

AI is a fascinating subject, and hopefully will be able to help make the world a better place over the next few years and decades.

My own experience suggests that technology can be a constraint on progress ... but nothing like the constraint that comes from the downright stupidity (or venality) of people. My career spans quite a long time, and a mainframe computer system I helped install in the 1960s had just 4 K of main memory. A modern smartphone is perhaps 1 million or 10 million times as powerful. Why is society only just a modest amount better ... if at all ... on top this absolutely amazing technical progress. Surely we can do much better than this!

I argue that in society we don't know how to measure things ... or worse ... we measure things that end up giving us the wrong answers.

The establishment of Bloomberg was a game changer. It served to improve access to data for (financial) decision making. This is good, up to a point. However, we also need something as effective for data about ALL the things that really matter in society, in the environment and in the economy. People and planet are in fact a whole lot more important than profit ... corporate performance and capital market performance .. though you would never get this from the data flows that exist in our modern world.

Best wishes on your journey

Peter

'James Hodson'

_____________________________ Peter Burgess ... Founder and CEO TrueValueMetrics ... Meaningful Metrics for a Smart Society Multi Dimension Impact Accounting http://www.truevaluemetrics.org LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/peterburgess1/ Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/PeterBurgess2/ Twitter: @truevaluemetric @peterbnyc Landline 570 431 4385 Email: peterbnyc@gmail.com Skype: peterburgessnyc